MIT List Visual Arts Center/Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Years before Chris Marker made his first film, he actively pursued still photography, and he spent much of his subsequent six-decade career engaged with a wide variety of media. Marker enthusiastically embraced analog-video synthesis in the 1970s and began experimenting with digitally altering images in the 1980s. In the last decades of his life, he published his work on CD-ROM, Flickr, and YouTube and built a museum in the virtual world Second Life dedicated to his oeuvre and influences. Split between the galleries at MIT and Harvard, the ambitious exhibition “Guillaume-en-Égypte”which took its name from Marker’s pet cat and alter egooffered an overview of all these aspects of his practice and more.

Curator João Ribas made an admirable attempt to be as inclusive as possible while staying true to each of Marker’s original mediums. The artist’s YouTube videos, which